In early August 2023, SALDRU hosted a policy discussion between Prof. Vimal Ranchhod and Pippa Green about the first Francis Wilson Memorial Prize for Data-Driven Research award-winning article (co-written with Miquel Pellicer from the University of Marburg). The article is titled Understanding the effects of racial classification in Apartheid South Africa and was published in the Journal of Development Economics.
In this wide-ranging interview, Vimal described how his interest in writing some version of this paper first began when he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, about twenty years ago. He explained the econometric challenges of trying to estimate the effects of racial classification, and how they considered multiple potential empirical strategies to do so over the years. Vimal talks about the economic literature on discrimination and why this paper is unique, remembers the many people who contributed to its evolution, and reflects on what the implications of these findings might be.